


It's Only Dark

by therev



Category: Supernatural
Genre: M/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2012-03-06
Updated: 2012-03-06
Packaged: 2017-11-02 08:19:53
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,647
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/366928
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/therev/pseuds/therev
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>It all ends anyway, just not the way it was supposed to. Dean and Cas make their own home in the aftermath. Future fic, circa 2020.</p>
            </blockquote>





	It's Only Dark

**Author's Note:**

> Spoilers through S7.

It all happened anyway. Not the apocalypse as the Bible or God or some hallucinating Greek described it, they stopped that version of it, but it happened all the same.

It was a virus and it was unstoppable. At least unless you were fortunate enough to have some dumb-luck collection of antibodies, the circumstances of the existence of which couldn't quite be pinned down because the scientists and doctors and faith healers trying to figure it out all died trying. It took a lot of people. It took a lot of monsters, too. Who would have guessed that the best weapon against the freaks was viral?

It took Sam.

He was a giant who killed evil sons-of-bitches with his bare hands and he was immune to a highly infectious demon virus and Lord knows what all else, but when it came down to a cellular, non-supernatural level, he was still human. He died on a Tuesday. Dean has never found that funny.  
____

Some things don't change, even at the end of the world.

No, not the world. The world's still there. That's one of the things that doesn't change. Cas says the world won't end for a very long time. Cas would know.

Some things don't change. The sun still sets in the west, red-orange and dusty-blue on top, crickets still call the end of a day, and dirt still smells the same, for whatever specimen of dirt it happens to be. Dean's been all over, stepped in and been thrown down into a lot of different soil. The mostly-clay of Alabama, the mostly-sand of Florida, the frozen, snow-covered ground of Michigan. But this is Wyoming dirt, old and musty, and for the last three years, home.

It flies off of the horse's back he's brushing out and into his face when the wind blows just right, gritty and salty. He jokes to Cas sometimes that half the salt in his diet these days comes from horse hide. The horse, Pat (Patty when Dean is feeling fond, Pattycakes when he's feeling fonder and no one's around), is a big Morgan mare he found at a farm south of Casper where his Baby's still parked on a dirt backroad that he will probably never find again. Of course he didn't know that's what she was when he found her, or what to do with her except to throw a rope on her and hope she didn't kill him.

He'd met a girl in Casper, too. Not that kind of girl. She was only fifteen but she'd been riding since she could remember and she told him the horse was probably a Morgan and that her bridle was too big for her and the saddle was too small for him. Her name was Shannon and she'd buried her mother seven months before Dean met her. She followed Dean back to camp on her own horse, telling Dean to keep his heels down and to lay the reins on Pat's neck to turn her, and not to pull so tight. She's still at camp. She's eighteen now, he thinks. Time seems so different, but Dean checks on her whenever he goes.

He always thought, because of what Zachariah had shown him, that if it all eventually ended up the way it could have then that he'd still be surrounded by familiar faces. But there is no Chuck to hassle him over toilet paper, or even Sam in a snappy white suit. Everyone is a stranger. At first, anyway. Everyone but Cas.

He finishes brushing out Pat and turns her out to pasture. It's hard to find feed that hasn't gone bad so she's on a mostly-grass diet. She's a little fat all the same. He puts the tack away and brushes his hands on his pants but they're just as dirty, so he strips them off and hangs them up on a bridle hook with his shirt and stuffs his socks into his boots and walks naked across the field, Wyoming dirt soft between his toes, grass to his bare calves in the slate evening dark.  
_____

When the first people started dying they thought it was Pestilence again somehow, even years later, something they had missed. Cas assured them that it was not, even though by then Dean knew his all-seeing mojo was dwindling. It was too big anyway, even for a horseman. Too fast and too widespread and it didn't smack of righteousness, just ugly, hopeless death.

They were advised by television and radio to lay low and for once they did, hid like civilians in one gutted house or another. When supplies ran low Dean would go into town alone, easier that way. At first it was like hurricane-panic. Stock got low on the shelves, water and batteries were scarce. Then everything was scarce. Then there were fires.

But before the fires, before the radio cut out but for a few AM stations and emergency broadcasts, before those were gone too, before the streets were too clogged with the skeletons of cars and people to pass, before all of that, one day, Sam went on a supply run.

Cas had tried to save him. Dean knows that.

Contagion wasn't the only reason they burned Sam's body.  
_____

Dean doesn't burn things much anymore, even though it's a wood stove and before this he'd only ever cooked scrambled eggs or spaghetti or mac-and-cheese. He'd kill for mac-and-cheese now.

Or just cheese.

He's gotten good at cooking, or as good as he can with limited resources. Cas brings him books. The first had been really basic. Dean had pretended to be insulted but he's read it cover-to-cover. The second had been all about pie. Now he turns biscuits out of the tin, golden without, fluffy within. There's even preserves that Dean put up last year. He's got a book on making butter (cheese, too) but he hasn't tried it yet. Dean misses butter.

There's salt pork a neighbor gave them and peas Dean grew himself. The dog he won't name and just calls Dog but Cas calls Molly for some reason he's never told Dean (it's not even a girl) whines at his feet as he eats alone. He gives Dog what he thinks Cas won't eat and calls him a biscuit-eater and pets his bony hound head.

He stokes the fire in the living room, adds a couple of small logs, just enough to still be going when Cas gets back, or when he thinks Cas will get back. He looks around the room. There's a guitar but he's not up for it, so he picks out a book from one of the shelves. He's got a half-read one on the bedside table upstairs about local plants but that will only hold his interest for so long, and the one-third-read McCarthy is depressing the fuck out of him. His default in this case is usually Louis L'Amour, because they're kind of funny and really predictable, and it's not even just that the good guy always wins so long as the bad guy loses. Plus, the guy wrote a thousand books and one of the former occupants was a collector, so he has his pick. He still re-reads a few he's liked best. They make his new frontier life feel more like Hollywood fiction than end-times survivor reality.

He tells Dog to stay then carries the book and a lamp up the stairs.

Dog follows him.  
_____

Cas had been different when he came back. Even different from God-Cas or Leviathan-Cas or even deeply-apologetic-Cas. He had apologized, sure, but then he'd been the one to stop the Leviathans when Dean thought there would be no way in hell, and fixed what he'd broken in Sam, so Dean had no choice but to forgive him. Sam, too.

After that, with no imminent threat hanging over their heads, they'd just started hunting again, simple things, ghosts and wendigos and even a maybe-bigfoot, whatever they could find. Funny thing was that there wasn't a lot of monsters left; the leviathans had an appetite for more than just humans and a no-monsters policy. Cas hunted with them no matter the job, but always withdrew after the hunt. Dean never knew or asked where the angel would go. Even now he doesn't know.

And then he didn't stay gone for so long. And then he never left, and he stopped wearing that overcoat everywhere and borrowed Dean's clothes and then he had his own. He became as much of a fixture to the impala as Dean or Sam or Dean's sawed-off, and after a while of rotating couches or floorspace for beds (after, to everyone's unspoken surprise, he'd started sleeping), he would share a bed with one or the other. Almost always Dean. Then only ever Dean.

Cas had been different that first day and Dean thinks he's been a little different every day after. A little more each day. He doesn't want to say more human but definitely less angel. He'd been careful those first years after the new plague hit, because that's what most folks called it, he'd been careful of booze, of substances around Cas. No going Hotel California on me, man, he'd say and Cas would frown and squint and tilt his head and Sam would have laughed if he'd been there to see it.

Dean doesn't want to say more human, because he doesn't know that whatever speck of angel left in Cas isn't what's keeping Dean from burning another body.  
_____

Dean is half asleep when he hears Pat whinny into the dark and he can't hear a horse call back but he knows she can. It's a while later that Dog lifts his head from Dean's knee and slinks lazily off of the bed and down the stairs just as Dean hears the screen porch door open and shut. It's even later and he's read the same sentence a few bleary-eyed times when Cas pads into the room barefoot and washed-up for bed and slides in behind him, looks over Dean's shoulder as he slides an arm around him. His front fits to Dean's back, familiar by now, like the voice in his ear and the rumble of it between them.

"Hey," Cas says.

"Evenin', cowboy."

"You read too much of that."

"You smell like horse is all."

Cas snuffles between his neck and shoulder and Dean abandons Louis L'amour utterly. "You smell like dirt."

"I rinsed off in the pond."

"You smell like dirt and pond water then."

"You like it."

Cas pulls at his bare shoulder to roll him onto his back a little more, lifts Dean's arm to nuzzle the fuzz of his armpit. "I do," he admits.

"You're so weird," Dean says, smiling, and slides his arm over Cas's shoulders. Cas settles against him. "What's shakin' in Dodge?"

"They've cleared as far as Maple street. You wouldn't recognize it. You should come with me next time."

"Maybe."

"Everyone asks about you. Hank uncovered a bunker full of canned goods. He sent a can of cherries. They're in the kitchen."

"Sweet."

"Emily's going to have her baby any day."

Dean swallows thickly. Cas is warm under his hands but the room seems cold. "She afraid?"

"Probably. But you know her. The baby's made it this far. It's a good sign."

"I hope so."

Cas pushes up on an elbow to look at him. "Life will go on, Dean. It persists."

"I know that. Don't tell me that like I don't know."

Cas touches his face, touches his mouth until Dean stops frowning at him, then leans down and kisses him, light and soft and careful at first, then not as careful, then his mouth is on Dean's chin, his throat, teeth pinching at a nipple and Dean hisses at that, at the hand that slides down past the waistband of his pants and Cas doesn't stop to ask permission because it's long since given, years past needed.

"Come with me tomorrow."

"Maybe," Dean says.  
____

Cas had been different when he came back but so had Dean, and even more so after Sam was gone. There had been times he doesn't like to remember now when he had begged Cas to put him out of his misery, to put him down, to send him to heaven to see Sam, to hell to find Adam, he didn't care. Anything was better than this. No one deserved this.

They shared a bed even after it was only the two of them, even when the houses they were in had beds and rooms to spare. The night that Sam died Dean didn't sleep at all, but when he did Cas had been there, and without being asked Cas had held him, as he did the night after, and after that, until Dean's grief faded enough to realize that he wanted comfort for other reasons. Until one night, drunk on gin and loss and desire, he'd tugged on Cas's hand and spoken hot and wet against Cas's mouth.

"Just fucking touch me, Cas, alright? Just... just make me come, please."

Cas did. Because Cas did anything Dean asked him, and Dean liked to think that it wasn't the first time Cas had thought about it, because even drunk he could see the way Cas watched him, watched his own hand moving over Dean's cock, with Dean's hand there to coach him, and the open surprise on his face when Dean came between them, panting and clutching at Cas's shoulders, and then crying against them. That's another thing Dean doesn't like to remember but he knows no one was judging him that night but himself.

It wasn't until later, when Cas was a lot more human, that Dean made him come for the first time, though not for lack of trying. Angels just don't work that way, he guessed.

"Fuck, Cas, that was--"

"Grace," Cas had said, chest heaving, whole body trembling and eyes wide, so impossibly wide.

"What?"

"It was..." he blinked hard, then stared down at Dean with such astonishment. "...ecstasy. Grace. I guess I'd forgotten what it felt like."

"Being an angel is like twenty-four-seven climax?"

"I guess so."

"Man. I owe you a the biggest goddamn apology," Dean had said, not even really joking, and later he added, "Do you ever miss it?"

Cas hadn't asked what. There was only one thing for him to miss.

"I'm still an angel, Dean."

"Fundamentally, maybe."

"No. I don't miss it."

"How could you not?"

"Because being with you is better than heaven."  
_____

They say that New Orleans isn't much different than before, that they have city-wide electricity and oil reserves and the booze still hasn't run out. They say France is rubble and ash and Japan is a military island, fully functioning and thriving and that people come on boats and rafts and get shot for their efforts. They say there's a doctor in L.A. with a cure, a whole colony of inoculated survivors. Dean doubts that such news could travel so far even if any of it were true, but he doubts that last part most of all.

They say that the virus has burned itself out, that the children who are never born are just the unlucky victims of their mother's poor diet and a lack of modern medical attention. Others say it's in all of them, that they're all carriers. Dean thinks that's probably true.

"City" is a dirty word. A nightmarish one. "City" means a place that smells of death and belongs in maybe or maybe-not exaggerated stories of cannibals and roving gangs of rapists and murderers. Because even at the end, some people are still assholes. Back when it was all still militant and survivalist, before the fuel and ammunition got so low, Dean and Cas spent a month in Detroit, trying to make it, trying to help, trying. But Cas took a bullet to the shoulder and Dean had thought that maybe this time he'd be too human. They left the city and found a camp in Wyoming, just a dozen people huddled in a few houses, sharing food and keeping each other safe. It was survival on a scale they could handle.

Dean's sheriffing days are over but Cas still thinks he can make a difference. Some days he's a mediator, a carpenter, some days a doctor. He repairs broken houses and sets broken bones and when Emily and John had wanted to be married they asked Cas to marry them. The dozen have turned to dozens, drifters and, miraculously, found family. Cas delivered the first baby (the first to make it far enough to be delivered) last fall. Dean has held her a few times. Her name's Cassie.  
_____

He wakes before Cas and slips into jeans and a sweater and coat because it's not even fall but mornings are cold in the early dark. He feeds up first and the rooster greets him with an ear-splitting crow as he heads to the hen house and Dean gives him the finger. One day he's gonna break his neck and silence him forever and it's gonna be the best chicken dinner they've ever had.

Eggs scrambled and warmed-over biscuits and Cas shuffles in to stand at Dean's shoulder, to kiss him on it and to lean his forehead there sleepily, his hair tickling Dean's cheek. To say good morning. Dog has followed him in and sits on Dean's feet while they eat.

The house is from the 30's. Dean found an old deed a few days after they moved in. It has all the old hardware, crystal and brass, and hardwood floors. Someone had taken care of it. Possibly the old man whose body they found on the front porch, or the woman named Agnes who'd been not-too-long buried out back beneath an oak tree.

They take care of it now, the two of them. Dean mostly because he's there more. He stays. He doesn't often go into camp anymore, or to town as Cas has started calling it. He likes having a home to take care of. He likes having Cas to take care of, even if he probably doesn't need it.

When Sam had died the first time, Dean had known there was an Out, a way to get him back, and he'd taken it. Later, when he thought Sam was locked in Hell for a year, there had always been maybe-a-way, always a chance, and it was the hoping that tore Dean apart. Now, with Sam gone definitely for good--he wouldn't admit it to anyone, not even to Cas--it's easier. He has hope but it's for the corn to grow tall, for tomatoes red and ripe, for a horse that stays sound and for Cas to make it home every night. He's got grey in his hair and his back kills him some days and he reads books on herb gardens and chicken husbandry and he sews sometimes. It's not the end of the world but it's the end of most things and it's the most normal his life's ever been.

"Are you coming with me?" Dog is licking Cas's fingers as he tries to tie his boots after breakfast and Cas pushes him gently away, says "No, Molly," and Dog wags and sits but noses at Cas's fingers anyway. "John needs help with their roof and I want to be there in case Emily goes into labor."

"If she hasn't already."

"Yes."

There are clothes to wash and he found some paint in the shed that hasn't yet dried up and he was going to put it to use on the front porch steps, not for looks but preservation, but Cas, even sleepy-eyed and rubbing his cold hands over his thighs to warm them, is ready to go out and save the world one roof at a time and Dean knows how hard he tries.

"Alright, but you're catching my horse."  
____

They say there are ghosts everywhere. In houses and hospitals and lakes and gutted-out factories, in cars and culverts and Winnebagos and burned church bathrooms. Dean doesn't know if it's true. If it is they're keeping quiet, harmless or apathetic or just as frightened as the living. He thinks it's probably just echoes of memories in places now silent and dead that used to be noisy and alive, projections from those left who want to still see what isn't there. Either way, he thinks it's funny that it took the end of things for people to start believing what he knew was true all his life.

Early on, after Cas had come back and they were hunting together and Sam was still alive and Cas was still an angel more than just fundamentally, Cas had said, "Can I ask, Dean... please don't think I'm offering, I only want to know--"

"Spit it out, Cas."

"Why haven't you asked me to bring Bobby back?"

Dean had shrugged, watched the horizon where the sun was setting and Sammy was taking his turn backfilling a grave against the dusk-pink of it. "I thought about it," he said. "But... and I know it's really fucking selfish, okay, but if you bring him back, I've just got to lose him again."  
____

They saddle up during a short-lived drizzle and pack the last of the biscuits and fill canteens from the well. Cas is already mounted and opening the gate from horseback and Dean leads Pat through and shuts it behind them.

"Stay," he tells Dog, then swings up and touches his heels to Pat's sides and follows Cas out onto the worn trail as the sun, still rising in the east, burns the mist and dew from the grass, dries it from horse hide and damp hair and canvas coats.

Dog follows them.


End file.
